my first roast chicken

This fall I’ve spent some time working on a mobile chicken slaughtering crew. The equipment is owned by a local non-profit, Island Grown Initiative, and they rent it out to local farmers and hobbyists who need to “harvest” their birds. While I have yet to knife any chickens myself, I have gotten reasonably quick on the evisceration table. It helps that, being female, my hand is small enough to get all the way into the body cavity, which makes separating and removing organs a hell of a lot easier.

It is fairly common for the owners to offer a chicken to each of the “processors” at the end of the day. This is a very generous custom, given that each bird is fairly valuable (pasture-raised chickens sell for about $20 a pop around here) and we are already paid for our time working on the rig.

For me, it’s lead to a backlog of birds. The pressure to finally do something was becoming fairly overwhelming. In my formative years as a cook, I was a vegetarian, and I’ve just never gotten around to learning how to cook meat. When I think about the life of the chicken, the idea of cooking one inspires borderline paralysis. I think of the bird’s journey from the hatchery in a cardboard box, on the first day of life. Huddling under a heat lamp with all his little buddies in the early weeks. Progressively venturing out on grass, eating bugs and grain, getting fat fast. The days go by.

Each bird is a little world. When I mess up an eggplant dish, it’s kind of whatever. I eat something else, maybe go pick some more eggplant and don’t think about it too much. But to botch a bird is a sad, somehow disrespectful thing. To raise an animal for food, and then proceed to make bad food? I didn’t want to be that person.

But this evening, it was do or die time. I had specific instructions from one mister Tom Palmer, the roast chicken master. And I had a bird in the fridge from Doug, a local farmer/friend. He dropped it off yesterday, because one of his freezers had gone on the fritz and the bird had thawed. Once it’s been frozen and thawed, apparently you can’t refreeze it – texture problem. So I had to cook this thing. Now.

Miraculously, it turned out to be a

MAJOR SUCCESS.

SERIOUSLY DELICIOUS.

EVERYONE VERY IMPRESSED.

the next frontier?

gravy.